I hope the name “hobbits” doesn’t catch on. Hobbits appear to be gregarious, funloving creatures of modern human intelligence, and living in a preindustrial yet civilized society. While these fossil humans had Australopithecoid back teeth, ape-like shins, and Homo erectoid skull contours. My god, did everyone notice the saggital crest?
Oh, also one of the links I’ve read said they had long arms and short legs. I wonder if they spent much of their time in trees?
The article I saw said they most likely lived in trees due to the long arms and the fact that there were Komodo dragons running around on the ground.
It also said there were rats the size of Golden Retrievers. shudders
Oh, come on. Who hasn’t murdered a hobbit? I know I have!
But it isn’t really murder when it’s a hobbit, your just putting the poor little bugger out of our missery.
Oh. My. God.
Actual Rodents of Unusual Size.
It is just like the movies.
That’s just phenomenal. Wow.
Well, we know that if they find a normal-sized homo sapiens female who died by choking on some fruit, we can definitely call bullshit on this.
They did their research, there are professor’s in the fields at the Universities specified.
And elephants the size of hippos (from the NPR story this morning.) Sounds like someone had the proportionals all wrong on that island.
Insular populations tend to gigantism and dwarfism – creatures that would be large plains-dwellers on continents tend to reduce in size, in order to maximize their adaptation to the the more limited plains area of an island, while smaller animals tend to grow larger, better filling an econiche that would be filled by a larger-bodied animal on a continent. I.e., on a hypothetical island off the coast of North America, wolves might not have survived, there not being enough large-bodied herbivores to feed a functional pack. But skunks might grow larger and become hunters-of-larger-herbivores because there was a functional skunk econiche on the island, so they survived, and then the hunter-of-larger-herbivores niche was open and they had some preadaptations for it as hunter-of-smaller-animals.
Most of the Mediterranean islands had Pleistocene elephant populations that were dwarfs by elephant standards, with Malta and Cyprus, the extremes in dwarfism, having elephants the size of German shepherds. A short time before this, Italy had a population of hedgehogs that had grown to about the same size.
Apparently there was also a giant ape living near the volcano that the locals worshipped and called “Kong”.
Prediction: we’re six weeks from a Michael Crichton novel on this subject. :rolleyes:
I love it when reality throws accepted notions into the proverbial cocked hat. I’ve no problem with the idea of evolutionary processes driving the variation of species, but we know so little about how it really works. All to often I’ve seen utterly silly speculation cloaked with the mantle of evolution (think, for example, of Desmond Morris’ notion that natural selection is producing large human breasts; if so, ya gotta lotta flat-chested women to explain). This find holds the potential to teach us a lot about evolution.
Maybe the Florisians rode the hugh rats as we do horses? ?
Florisian rat: I’m a noble steed!
Last night, as I was telling my kids about this for our late night science discussion, my daughter asked how life got started. I said no one really knew. Do you think we’ll ever know? Well, it might be pretty tough. Maybe if someone could reproduce the conditions in a lab and create life anew. But then I got to thinking about DNA. Just how the heck are you going to generate that in a test?
The weird thing is that it’s just like a bunch of movies. Hobbits, ROUSes… is there a movie with elephants the size of ponies?
A possible relative of the Giant Rats of Sumatra?
Babar? Not necessarily pony-sized, but certainly smaller than a full-size elephant. Obsoive.
On a totally irrelevant aside, although I knew what it would be about, the thread title made me think of someone “coming out” during a vacation to Bali…
Not a movie but I seem to recall an episode of South Park where they tried to breed an elephant with a pot-bellied pig in order to make a small house pet sized elephant.
Coming out as a homo hobbit fancier no less 
He’s already done a two-species-of-hominids-in-conflict book:
In Eaters of the Dead (1976) the eponymous Eaters were Neanderthals. This was Crichton’s best novel, IMHO. It was fairly faithfully adpated for film as The Thirteenth Warrior in 1999.
BTW, my previous post falls on its face :smack: because in my haste to make a pervy Hobbit-fancier joke I momentarily forgot that Homo is the genus game.
I heard on NPR that there are old stories / myths among the native people there of a race of little people, so they might have been contemporary with H. sap.
For that reason, this notion really creeps me out. I’m not sure why. We don’t find chimpanzees creepy because of their similiarities to us, we find them fascinating. Would we be creeped out if we had a chance to meet H. floresiensis, or fascinated?